Tree-derived fat substitute could make junk food healthier

Here’s some good news for junk food and cookout lovers: staples such as hot dogs and ice cream could soon be taking a healthy turn, and it's all thanks to trees.

Borregaard, a Norwegian biorefinery company, has developed a fat substitute called Sense-Fi that can be used to bulk out things such as ice cream, yogurt and mayonnaise, as well as be added to emulsified meat, such as hot dogs.

According to Socius, a nutritional company that supplies the product, Sense-Fi is a thickener that looks like white cream and provides the same texture and mouthfeel as fat. It is made from micro-fibrillated cellulose, which is a waste product trees produce when they are converted into timber. Every year, plants produce more than 160 billion tonnes of cellulose, the material that makes up the walls of plant cells, but only a small fraction of that is useful to humans and our crops. Researchers have figured out a way to turn the indigestible cellulose into starch.

According to Wired.co.uk, biological systems engineers from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University researched methods of breaking down cellulose into more basic glucose blocks, then putting them back together to make complex starches. After generating enzymes from genetically-modified E.coli bacteria taken from fungi, potatoes and other bacteria, the team used them to break down the cellulose into the slightly simpler cellobiose. Another enzyme then splits the cellobiose into two separate glucose molecules, one of which is on its own, while the other has a phosphate molecule attached.

victorismyhero wrote:So basically we are going to replace fat with yet more ~"hidden sugar" ???

Yeah    thats healthy......